Dear Cincinnatians, How can I put this? To be perfectly honest, your Oktoberfest sucks. During the week I recently spent stranded in 
JFK airport, I read in a magazine about “the largest Oktoberfest outside of Munich”. How could I resist visiting Zinzinnati, OH for what promised to be an event of true, as we like to say in Hamburg, “Ger-Mania”? How could I resist traveling to such an exotic-sounding city to witness how Deutsch immigrants had come to reside in your hodge-podge crazy quilt of a country where not only do the planes not run on time, but you find yourself undergoing days of psychological intimidation, are constantly told that you will be able to get on the next flight and then at the last second they cancel it, and tell you to be back in line at five a.m. so you curl into a fetal position on the terminal floor and try to sleep while American janitors wax floors three feet from your head and then at 5 a.m., they, the airline-a-matrix tells you you will definitely get on the flight at four, which is, of course, cancelled at the last minute. Truly, America is a land of opportunity, if we’re talking about the opportunity to be broken and reduced to hugging oneself, rocking and weeping piteously on an airport terminal floor.
I arrived in Cincinnati exactly as the chicken dance began. It was then that I noticed the first major difference between American and German Oktoberfests. Americans have absolutely no shame. In my country, no matter how many beirs one has, you simply would not move in this irritating and unnatural fashion. Some have suggested that the polka itself is irritating and unnatural, but this chicken imitation thing, in combination with silly hats has little to do with the true meaning of Oktoberfest.
I immediately went to a beer stand. There was no line, and the girls of an organization called Delta, Delta, Delta, offered me the choice between Budweiser or Bud Light. I purchased one and, turning around, saw other beer carts with long lines. I spied Spaten Munich, poured what in my country would not be called beer but “sparkling rice-flavored malt beverage” down a sewer grate, and immediately acquired a twenty ounces (about 0.59 liters) of Spaten Munich Optimator. At last I was drinking good German beer, although looking around, there wasn’t enough of it. Some of the local brews were well-intentioned attempts at fine Deutsch drinks, it is true, but on the whole, the beers lacked umlauts. Only one umlaut in the entire festival: Erdinger Weisbräu. Everyone knows that any quality Deutschbier has at least eight umlauts. In getting the throat involved with the vowels, it is properly prepared for the drink itself… stretching, everyone knows, is important before serious exercise.
My week of camping on the floor of JFK with nothing to eat but month-old cellophane-wrapped sandwiches had left me famished, so I immediately set about procuring a potato pancake. Attention Americans: any German-style potato pancake does not come formed like a bar of soap and sheathed in a cardboard sleeve. Nor is it a greasy mass of semi-cooked spuds as if Mr. Potato just threw up. Even the Dutch would not consider this a potato pancake. I found a biergarten and sat with a passable Bratwurst, a Warsteiner, and some funnelcake to take in a polka or two played by an enormous accordion band. Perhaps you should give some thought to increasing funding for music education in your country? We, the German people, do not expect everybody to be fine engineers, or that your backwards Wildwest nation of cowboys should produce a Beethoven or Bach, but this accordion band reduced me to clutching my knees, rocking, and weeping piteously. At last I stuffed my ears with uneaten potato pancake, downed my Warsteiner, and escaped the torturous strains of thirty accordions played in unison. I managed to hail a cab for the airport. German heritage, indeed.
Sincerely, Kläus Weinstein
